Tina Shot Me Between the Eyes - Antoinette Tidjani Alou

“Tidjani Alou’s writing sketches the commonplace and the metaphysical, with heft, honesty, and audacity. The range is compelling, as she takes us through lives in places as diverse as Accra and Niamey. The prose is deft, her metaphors sting with accuracy. This is a writer to think and feel with.” – Emmanuel Iduma, editor, Saraba Magazine.

A grandmother with a food-induced encounter, an ecclesial romance with a tomcat set in the throes of uncertain times, eating and drinking for freedom, wife battery under the watchful eyes of communal love, desperately seeking lovers burdened by violent pasts, and a woman taking liberty after nine children with nine husbands are some of the characters and stories in Antoinette Tidjani Alou’s debut fiction collection.

In fifteen formidable lyrical prose, Tina Shot Me Between the Eyes explores how the self is shaped and transformed by the knots we yearn to tie around ourselves: familial, spousal, parental, professional, and societal. It tackles how we struggle in relationships for nourishment and fulfilment, and how relationships could kill us and how we could kill to survive – a potent force for understanding humanity and the nuances of acts of violence, tolerance, faith and love.

Jamaican-born Antoinette Tidjani Alou teaches French and Comparative Literature at the Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey in Niger, where she has lived for more than two decades. She writes in English and in French, covering life-writing, poetry and short stories.